Comment on NSA Claims It Can’t Watch a Tape It Recorded in the 1980s
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 2 months agoI’m not talking about the city budget, I’m saying the person requesting documents could pay for the labor needed to get the documents.
chiliedogg@lemmy.world 2 months ago
A third party can’t view the un-redacted documents because the city can’t share them.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Right, hence the payment. With the payment, the city could hire someone to free up time for someone to handle and redact the documents.
chiliedogg@lemmy.world 2 months ago
The State only allows us to charge $15/hour for staff time for PIRs, so we can’t just hire someone or ask an employee to work an extra 20 hours a week for a year to pull some documents the requestor won’t even read.
The thing is lots of these ludicrous requests are made by right-wing lobbyists who try to make us spend 80 grand on a pointless request so they can point out how the city is wasting money. They create problems so they can get the state to remove our ability to make local Ordinances.
For legitimate requests, we go out of our way to meet them. I’ve spent a lot of time digging through paper files from the 1920s to help citizens.
But most of our requests are either automated bullshit from realtors looking for cheap land, insurance companies looking for who to advertise to, contractors looking for work, lobbyists looking to stir up shit, or, oddly enough, lawn service companies.
For those requests, we do what’s legally required and not a damn thing more.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
That makes sense, but there should always be a way to get information from a government, even if it’s expensive. Governments work for the people, so everything should have a process.
I’m sure someone would be willing to pay hundreds of thousands to get the footage in the OP, and saying “no, is it’s too hard” isn’t acceptable.